[Crimson Dynamo]

DOuglas has written an excellent article in the Telegraph today:

It’s in the UK’s national interest for Trump to triumph

Is there anyone in the world who cannot list Donald Trump’s flaws? They seem so manifest and so multiple
that even thinking of doing so evokes thoughts of barrels, shooting and fish. His unwillingness to ever miss
an opportunity to boast. His career-long devotion to exaggeration. His desire to talk up everything about
himself and talk down everything about anyone else. This and much more can all be held against him and regularly is.

He is also one of the most successful figures in US history. In his career before the presidency he made a fortune,
lost a fortune, made a fortune again, then ran for president and – having never held political office –
gained the presidency on his first try. You don’t need to admire him, let alone love him, to notice that
there is something uncommon about him. And uncommon people – especially uncommonly successful people –
generally have something worth teaching.

Opinion polls suggest that the British people have never warmed to Trump and find his vulgarity as well as
what news about him filters through to be reason enough to dismiss him. But taking this view deprives us of
something. Not least an ability to learn what it is about Trump that makes him appealing to a significant proportion
of the American public and what has made aspects of his time in office a success. Listing Trump’s virtues may be
harder than listing his flaws, but still they are there and worth highlighting.

Take Trump abroad. The revelations about him – not least in John Bolton’s recent memoir – can be hair-raising without a doubt.
The President’s lack of awareness about major aspects of foreign policy. His ignorance of basic things (such as – apparently –
this country being a nuclear power) are enough to instil in the foreign policy establishment a desire to have a lie down.
And yet those same foreign policy establishments have been shown to be wrong time and again.
Whether it is intelligence failures over WMDs, or a total lack of foresight over nearly any major
event (such as the so-called Arab Spring) we have of late had a foreign policy establishment that can hardly point
to a single success. What is more, among most candidates for the US presidency, it seemed to have become
a prerequisite for office to appeal to the American public on the basis that you’d be keener than any of your
opponents to send American troops into battle. Any battle.

Trump reversed all of that, promising to prevent America being dragged into quagmires around the world.
Of course there are consequences to America’s withdrawal. But Trump was not wrong when he berated the
foreign policy failures of his predecessors and rivals. Had Hillary Clinton achieved the Oval Office, it is almost
certain that she would have got her country into one or more conflicts in the Middle East among other places.

The person who actually won the 2016 race has done no such thing. He has not only stuck to his promise
not to get America into any more wars, he has done things that his predecessors would never have done
without getting America into endless such conflicts.



Cast your mind back to January when American forces killed General Qasem Soleimani.
The moment the killing of Iran’s foremost general was announced, the entire foreign policy
commentariat went into overdrive. “Is this our era’s Franz Ferdinand moment?” they asked.
And that was just the less excitable ones. There seemed a general belief – once again –
that Trump was going to get us all killed. And yet – once again – he didn’t. American forces
took out Iran’s leading general, a man who had overseen the deaths of countless numbers of
British and American troops, not to mention Iraqi and other civilians in the area, and Iran took it.
Not least because they seemed to fear that they were dealing with a madman.

It is the same with the other notable foreign policy strides of his presidency. Whether it is the still
under-heralded but utterly historic Israel-UAE peace deal. Or his unexpected efforts to address the
problem of North Korea. Time and again Trump has done bold, brash and often nail-biting things in
the foreign arena. But he has come through them. Like all presidents he could have done more in
other places. But in the areas that Trump has applied himself to, he has made quite extraordinary
achievements. And the fact that he is unpredictable and perhaps even a little crazy (an impression
we must hope that he works at cultivating) can be a great virtue in the international arena.

Likewise when it comes to the only major challenger to America’s global economic and military
dominance, Trump has been able to do things that none of his opponents would ever have
dreamed of doing. His re-building of the American military has not been done in order to use it
against third-rate despots and tinpot terrorist groups (who have demonstrated an uncanny ability
to play America to a draw in recent conflicts). Rather he has built it up in order to demonstrate to
China that American military dominance will not be allowed to dwindle away. He knows that if you
have military dominance, an awful lot of other games can also come into play.

Is there another candidate (in 2016 or now in 2020) who knows better than Trump the game
that is now in motion with Beijing? If there is then is there any other who would have been willing
to slap tariffs on the country, bring back jobs from China and much more in the way that Trump has
done? Long before the coronavirus hit, Trump had warmed up the American people to understand the
threat that China posed to them. Not as a military power but as an economic rival. An economic rival
whose actions were directly affecting the wage-packets of American workers. No European leader has
managed to do anything like that. And America’s desire to play the Chinese at their own game is a
major global play that is highly unlikely to survive the Trump presidency.

And then there are the issues that are of more immediate relevance to the UK. Most important of
which is the US-UK trade deal currently under negotiation. It seems unlikely that this deal will be
completed before the presidential election. Not for any lack of will on either side, but simply because
of the time it takes for the details of such agreements to be ironed out. The excellent trade teams on
both sides of these discussions want to arrive at a deal and given the opportunity they will do. The
good will in Washington and from the team around Trump is not to be ignored. Compare that with the
“back of the queue” that Trump’s predecessor said a post-Brexit Britain would be sent to.

On these issues and more, there are successes that this administration has achieved which are
worth reflecting on. Of course some will judge that these do not outweigh the negatives. Others
will accuse me of seeking to use a low tool for high purposes. But there are only two people on the
ballot this November. And the one most frequently presented as the most unstable and unpredictable
may yet prove to be the one who will give this country and the wider world the period of greater success and calm

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...trump-triumph/